Table salt is used to augment and enrich flavor of food products: it contains essential minerals for human life and is considered as a cultural part of cooking. The widespread use of table salt, however, also bears risks and disadvantages. High sodium levels in blood are associated with severe diseases or disorders, such as high blood pressure, kidney failure, heart attacks. This results in large endemic costs to societies and is a major contributing factor to rapidly growing health care cost in western societies.
It is also known that the taste of certain sea salts, e.g. fleur de sel, differ from the taste of standard table salt in a beneficial way. Such salts are, however, difficult to obtain and/or are not consistent in their quality. Such inconsistent quality and availability do not make application of such salts amenable to large scale industrial manufacturing. Hence, a reliable and scalable process for substituting such advantageous natural salts is required.
A number of documents disclose and claim the reduction of sodium in table salts (WO85/00958, BE902690, EP0417062, WO98/53708, US 2004/0224076) by the substitution of sodium chloride with different other salts, e.g. KCl, or different magnesium salts. Said compositions provide a salt flavor enhancing effect to food products containing such compositions. The disclosed compositions contain relatively high amounts of sodium and are not satisfactory with regards to their taste.
The prior art relating to the field of salt perception and salt delivery can be best separated into two subfields using a distinction based on the food's characteristics:
A) A distinct group of applications of salt is made on wet foodstuff, e.g. soups, sauces, mashed potatoes, beverages, or bread. This group of food is characterized by the fact that the salt is present in the form of aqueous ions broadly distributed within the food material. During preparation of the food, the salt is added in a process step where abundant liquid is present. As a result, the salt dissolves and is homogeneously distributed within the food material. A special case of products are “ready to use” powder soups (so called instant soups where the ingredients are present as a dry mixture but hot water added by the consumer also results in dissolution of the salt); these products are added to this group as the consumer makes the last processing step during preparation of the soup.
B) A different distinct set of applications of salt concerns dry foodstuff. This group contains dry snacks, dry, processed food such as fried or baked chips (e.g. potato, rice, wheat chips), scones, pastries, and others. During the preparation of this group of materials, salt is added in a dry form within one or more distinct processing steps. Insufficient liquid is present to dissolve and redistribute the salt. As a result, distinct salt grains are scattered on or within the food material. The consumer eats the material without further processing in contrast to e.g. instant soups (see group A).
As a direct consequence of above distinction, group A must specify a salt according to composition as ions well distributed throughout the material. No groups of cations and anions can be assigned to one another. Salts are typically identified or described as mixtures of specific mass content of specific ingredient salts (e.g. 90 wt % NaCl, 8 wt % KCl, 2 wt % CaCl2-6H2O). However, if looking at the food material, no distinct remainders of the ingredients can be identified beyond the ions that make up the salt.
While intuition may suggest that salt perception only depends on the chemical composition as described in the prior art (see above), the inventors of the present invention have surprisingly found a significantly improved salt perception on dry foodstuff if a specific structure and substructure of the salt constituents is provided. In particular the fact that ingredients for table salts (e.g. NaCl, KCl, Ca and Mg chlorides or sulfates, others) can be combined in specific ways, as further described below, will result in different and improved salt perception during consumption of the dry food.